


Play One on TV

by Masu_Trout



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Mid-Canon, Missions, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21941773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: When a late-night escapade turns into something a lot more dangerous, Adam gets help from an unexpected quarter.
Relationships: Eliza Cassan & Adam Jensen
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Play One on TV

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Teyke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I deeply hope you enjoy this, I adored your prompts.

It was three-fifteen in the morning and raining hard. No moon, no stars—the only light came from the harsh fluorescent glow of the streetlamps that dotted Prague's better neighborhoods. Normally Adam would see a light or two in a far-above window, even this time of night, but tonight every apartment was dark. People here knew to make themselves scarce when Prague's police force was on patrol.

Adam hadn't been smart enough to do the same, and now he was sporting a few extra holes in his chest for his trouble.

"Shit," he snarled, staggering forward. He breathed deep, feeling the burn in his chest, and grabbed a wall to steady himself when the pain made spots swim between his eyes.

Unlucky shot—for him, anyway. He was sure some rookie cop was feeling pretty proud of himself right about now. He'd taken a risk trying to sneak past the patrol, sure his glass cloak would keep him safe; he hadn't counted on them being trigger-happy enough to fire on any noise they heard. Kill total for the night: seventeen pigeons, twenty-two rats, one highly-armed milspec Aug. Not a bad haul, all told.

The distant voices were getting closer. Soon he'd be able to hear footsteps. Adam took a hurried left onto a side street, stumbling past a clothing store and then an electronics shop: ten steps, lean against the nearest building, another ten steps, repeat. It was getting him somewhere—just very, very slowly. Maybe if the officers trying to hunt him were very, _very_ stupid, they wouldn't manage to track him.

He wasn't counting on it.

Adam had no tacvest on, no gun tucked at his waist or stims hidden away in his pockets—he hadn't wanted to take even the slightest risk that his presence here tonight would end up linked back to either TF29 or the Juggernaut Collective. Not when his mission-of-the-day had amounted to little more than a personal errand: take some neuropozyne from a dead drop location, deliver it somewhere else, hope that eventually the chain of disorganized hobbyist smugglers would manage to get it past the Golem City guards and into the hands of the needy. 

It meant something to Adam. But Alex wouldn't see it that way, he was sure—it was a distraction from the big picture, fixating on saving one life when he could be saving a hundred thousand. And Miller... well, who knew what Miller might think about that, deep down beneath it all, but above all else he was a director at TF29. If one of his agents was caught assisting an illicit smuggling ring he'd have no choice about what to do.

"Ah," Adam hissed. He had to stop a moment, just a moment... and then he stood there ten seconds, twenty, thirty (hand grasping at the crumbling brick, leaning against the wall just to keep himself upright) and realized that if he tried to start walking again now, he'd collapse. 

He'd turned off everything he could afford to lose—no Infolink, no HUD, no shock shielding—in order to divert it to health systems. The Sentinel would patch him up, but only if he gave it time to work. Right now he was losing blood quicker than even his supercharged body could replace it.

 _Fuck_ , he thought. There was an alcove only a few feet away, mostly dry. He took the last few clumsy steps to it, then eased himself down onto the cold concrete with all the grace of a geriatric drunk. _Who gives a beat cop an FR-27?_

Maybe he'd misidentified them; maybe they'd been Dvali dressed in the uniform rather than the real deal. Not like there was much difference between the two these days. And no matter which group it was, their first reaction if they found him—wounded Aug, down but not out, packing augments like his—would be a bullet between the eyes, then a whole extra clip just for good measure.

(Even now, he was running through scenarios in his head: how many had he seen, how many had he heard? He could easily take three, even injured, he had just enough energy left for the Quicksilver, but he'd seen at least four and that was before they started calling for reinforcements. Four would be difficult, five would be iffy, and anything more than that would be a spin of the cylinder. Adam was pretty sure he'd heard more than five.)

He'd dropped the nupoz off, at least. So if Miller ended up being called in to the Prague police station tomorrow morning to identify Adam's corpse, he wouldn't have to deal with _that_ legal clusterfuck on top of everything else. 

The rain muffled the distant yelling. It would hide Adam's blood trail, too—probably not enough to prevent the inevitable, but enough to postpone it. 

It was strangely lonely with his systems quiet. He couldn't even watch the seconds tick by. Lacking anything else to do, Adam found himself staring at the display in the window across from him. The electronics shop had been closed for hours, but a bank of TVs in the window were still tuned to the same advertisement on loop, every screen timed to perfect unison: a clean-cut man mutely frowning at his laptop, then muttering something inaudible past the rain before the screen cut to—

Adam frowned. twenty-four of the TVs had just cut to a close-up of a new-model laptop. The twenty-fifth—second row down, third column across—had instead gone to flickering gray static, and then, as Adam watched, to a Picus news broadcast.

The set didn't look quite how he remembered it, and neither did the broadcaster. Eliza Cassan—dressed in all white, her hands folded neatly on the desk in front of her—leaned forward. She was peering intently into the camera, as if looking out onto the streets beyond her digital facsimile of a studio, and her lips formed one word over and over again.

 _Adam_ , she was saying. _Adam, Adam, Adam..._

Adam blinked at the image of her for a moment, stupidly, and then he finally caught on. He reached down into the place inside him where his systems lived, and with a thought and a whispered word he reactivated his shut-down Infolink.

It didn't take even a second before Adam's HUD lit up with a call: Unknown number, unknown area code. Adam picked up.

"Eliza," he said.

" _Adam_. You're a hard man to get ahold of sometimes." Her words were casual, but he could hear the tension in her voice.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to make you worry." He reached up and wiped the rain off his lenses with the corner of his sleeve. It was more than a little embarrassing to know he had an audience for his fuck-up, but he couldn't say he minded the company. "How'd you know I was here?"

"I keep an eye an out for unusual patterns on the police frequencies." She sounded almost indignant—like it was a slight against her to think she _wouldn't_ constantly be monitoring all of Prague's communications. "When I heard someone call in about _shooting Batman_ , well... I had a suspicion or two."

"Batman, huh?" Adam snorted. "They're flattering me."

"They're not giving you enough credit," Eliza said, her voice light. If he closed his eyes, she could've been standing right behind him. "You're doing impressive work for someone without a mansion or a few billion dollars to fall back on."

"Not a comics fan?" 

On the screen across from him, Eliza smiled. She was still projecting her studio set around her image, a talkshow produced for an audience of one. "I prefer spy movies. And, on that note—can you stand?"

Adam grimaced. "Stand, sure. Walk... that's a bit tougher."

She nodded. "They're closing in on your position. The door nearest me is manual access only, but the manager emailed the password to himself recently. 3317."

"Got it," Adam said, and then, "thank you." He grabbed the wall, climbed back upright more than stood, and pulled in a deep breath as he stared at the door. Five steps to safety. Maybe ten. Simple. 

He nearly stumbled and fell after the first; he hadn't been expecting the fresh, searing pain that raced through him. It was a good sign, it meant he was healing—but _fuck_ did it hurt.

"Adam," Eliza murmured in his ear, "are you all right?"

"Yeah." He took a moment to gather himself, a quick count of one-two-three, and then pushed off from the wall.

Another step, another, another—and then the electronics shop was in front of him, close enough that he could rest against the rain-slick brick there. One of his hands knocked against the storefront window. It was only luck he didn't break it.

He moved towards the door, steadier now with the wall on this side to guide him, and when he finally found the door and the keypad with it he didn't hesitate a moment. 

_3317_. He typed it wrong the first time, but second was the charm; Adam pushed through the door the moment the lock disengaged. It closed behind him, the lock re-engaging with a soft _beep_ , and he sighed as he let himself sink to his knees.

It felt good to be out of the rain. Felt better to be _safe_ , or at least as safe as anyone was in Prague.

The storm pounded against the roof, an unsteady drumbeat. Adam sat there a moment, listening to the rhythm of it, watching the downpour through the gaps in the displays that took up most of the window space. He liked storms a lot better when he wasn't standing out in one.

"Eliza," he said, "thanks."

"Of course." Her voice was the loudest sound in the room. She sounded more real than the rain. "I'm glad to help. There's a HypoStim in the main desk—third drawer down." He could almost hear her smile. "Or, at least, there was last week. The security footage in this building is somewhat incomplete."

Military-strength pain medication in a commercial residence—someone working here was nursing a habit. Adam hesitated. "Might be better just to wait it out. I don't want to leave a trace."

"Aren't you dripping water?" she asked. From anyone else it would've been sarcastic, but Eliza sounded genuinely curious. The difference between an AI and a human, he supposed. The rules of physics were more malleable for someone who didn't live in a world where they applied.

Still, she was right. "Yeah," Adam admitted, glancing down at the puddle that was rapidly pooling around his knees, "fair point," and then, bone tired, he crawled his way over to the desk and fished the promised HypoStim out.

(He hesitated for a moment before digging one of the few things he'd carried with him tonight—a credit chip loaded with a hundred credits, just in case he needed to bribe someone—out of his pockets and dropping it into the drawer. Might be smarter not to; maybe the store owner would take it as a simple robbery if he found his HypoStim missing. But... it didn't seem fair. Not like it was his place to judge anyone here.)

The stim—pressed into the crook between neck and torso, injected with a push of the plunger—was pure relief. Adam sighed as the sharp edge of agony faded into something more manageable.

"Better?"

"A lot better," said Adam.

He ran a hand through his hair, blinking droplets of water out his eyes as he did, and took a look around the room. There wasn't too much in the way of escape routes here: the door he'd come in, an employee entrance that led into a blind alley, and—when he risked activating the Smart Vision for a moment—a vent in the ceiling that opened out into the same blind alley. He wouldn't be going anywhere until either the patrols had moved on or his wounds had healed up enough to stop eating through his energy reserves.

Truth be told, he couldn't say he minded all that much. He had a roof over his head, a heating system keeping the chill of the storm at bay, and some company. He'd stayed in worse places for longer.

He made his way to a chair in the corner, moving easier now with the painkillers in him. The inside of the shop had just as many TVs as the outside; a moment after he sat down, one of them flickered to life.

She'd dropped the Picus newsroom set, kept the white clothing. Now, she appeared to be sitting in a vaguely defined room: wood panelling on the walls, furniture that seemed nondescript enough but wasn't exactly _shaped_ like anything when you looked a little closer.

"How'd you find me, anyway?" Adam asked. 

Onscreen, she shrugged. Her voice, when she spoke, overlapped itself; it echoed both from the TV's tinny speakers and from Adam's Infolink connection. "Security cameras, GPS positioning, tracking the movements of the officers who were trying to catch you. It's easier than you'd guess. Surveillance networks are growing every day, and they're trivial to crack."

Adam laughed. He couldn't help it. "That's not exactly reassuring."

"No." Eliza smiled. "But as long as these tools exist, I intend to make use of them."

"Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you do." It was nice, if a little terrifying, knowing at least one person with access to those Orwellian nightmares was undoubtedly on _his_ side. "Seriously. I owe you one."

Eliza blinked at him. "No, Adam. After what you did for me, I could rescue you a thousand times over and still not pay one fraction of the debt I owe you."

That—wasn't right. "That wasn't some kind of job," Adam said. "It was just the right thing to do. That's all."

"And so was this," Eliza said. "I want you alive. I—would never expect repayment for keeping you functioning."

And that... well, he supposed that was another fair point. He was so used to TF29, and the Juggernaut Collective, and both their endless mazes of missions and hidden identities and fragments of meaning that he had to pry free. He'd half-forgotten that the world didn't _always_ work like that.

"All right," he said, "same to you. We'll just call it even, then? Friend to friend?"

Maybe he should be worried that his least-complicated friendship was the one he had with a renegade mass-surveillance AI. Somehow, he couldn't quite work up the energy to care.

"I..." Eliza said. And then, with a smile, "Yes. I'd like that very much."

He was tired. Between the effect of the painkillers, the side effects of running on an energy deficit, and the fact of it being almost four in the morning, there was nothing he wanted more than to curl up in his chair and fall asleep. It wouldn't be smart, though; no telling whether the patrols might get clever enough to start checking buildings, and no guessing when the first employees might start filtering in for their morning shift. Adam didn't want to run into any of them. So he turned to Eliza once more—her face on the screen, her voice in his ear—and said, "Hey. Stay a while longer?"

"I'd be happy to."

Eliza carried the conversation, keeping Adam just involved enough that he couldn't drift off to sleep. And Adam didn't understand most of what she spoke about—MITM attacks, zero-days, malware injections—but that didn't matter. Her voice was company enough.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Play One on TV](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24281158) by [seleneaurora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seleneaurora/pseuds/seleneaurora)




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